I Care 3.0

Posted By  Bob Knotts 

The Humanity Project today announces a major expansion of our acclaimed teen driver safety program, I Care: Just Let Me Drive. We’re only now in the throes of creating important new additions to that part of the program aimed at educating parents of teen drivers. And at least for the moment, we’ve called that expansion I Care 3.0!

Over the next few months, the Humanity Project will be working with both parents and teens to take I Care to the next level. One key to this will be offering live seminars for groups of parents, where we can teach I Care’s important lessons in person — lessons that focus on the central influence parents have in helping their children drive safely. Research has shown consistently that parents are the major role models for their teen drivers, whether the adults know this or not. If kids see their folks texting or eating or checking sports scores while driving, those young drivers are much more likely to do the same. We also will look for new ways to get our core I Care books to more teens and more parents and we’ll explore other opportunities to discourage distracted teen (and parent) driving through I Care. Those books include the teen-created comic book and other fun materials for parents, something we call I Care: Just Help Them Drive.

None of this would be possible without the generous support of State Farm, our very good neighbors indeed. State Farm helped us create I Care from the ground up in 2012, with funding to work with teams of student writers, illustrators and photographers. This public-minded company also has continued to support I Care financially each year since then — funding that includes their latest grant to the Humanity Project.

We’re proud to tell you that State Farm has just given us $15,000 for I Care in 2016 and we are deeply grateful. This will allow us the resources and time to bring I Care to more people in more ways. We also must mention that I Care is supported with grants from our wonderful friends at Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital and Children’s Services Council of Broward County. These partners help us to help kids … and to help parents to help their kids as well. We are very, very appreciative to each of these fine organizations.

We’ll keep you posted on the progress of I Care 3.0. Please feel free to check out our existing free I Care resources on this website, which you can find by clicking on this link: I Care: Just Let Me Drive. Meanwhile, we want to thank State Farm again for making possible the latest expansion of our I Care program — with a special nod to Jose Soto, State Farm’s amazing Public Affairs Community Specialist for Florida. Jose and his colleagues at State Farm along with our other community partners are making a valuable contribution to society: helping to prevent accidents, injuries and deaths on the highways.

Too Much "Me"

POSTED BY: BOB KNOTTS

A more personal blog from me today as founder of the Humanity Project – but on a topic that very much involves our organization’s mission. For some long while now, I’ve been noticing something new in our society. I can sum it up in one word: “Me.” 

Our culture always has rewarded a me-first attitude, of course. Children are encouraged to compete against others and win rather than to compete against themselves and improve. Adults are encouraged to go for the bigger title and more pay whether or not that’s fulfilling for them and helpful to others. There’s nothing new about this habit in Western society, especially the United States: “Look at my new hat, look at my new car, look at my new shoes, look at my new haircut, look at my prestigious award or my exotic vacation or my gorgeous spouse.” And social media only has intensified this trend. Now we have selfies of … everything. All me, only me, all the time, me me me. You get to see my breakfast eggs and my Happy Hour and my dog’s Halloween outfit. “Hey, look at me!”

But now all this “me” appears to have a new outlet. Our language. And this is my point. If you listen closely to people talking, many folks nowadays use the word “me” in a way that I find different and disturbing. Because the word “me” often precedes every other name in a sentence. I hear this all the time. I hear it from famous celebrities and actors and talk show hosts. I hear it from politicians. I hear it from everyday people. It may be a sentence of the grossly ungrammatical variety: “Me and Jim went to the ballgame.” Or it may be simply a revealing reversal of the standard wording taught in schools and in educated families during decades past: “The ballgame was a fun day for me and Jim.”

I’d always learned the opposite. The other person’s name comes first, as in “The ballgame was a fun day for Jim and me.” Or if expressing the idea in the first example above: “Jim and I went to the ballgame.”

In some ways, obviously, this is a very small thing. But again, I find it revealing. And yes, troubling. To me, it suggests that more and more people are becoming more and more obsessed with “me” at a very deep psychological level. Me first, always – even in the way we speak our casual thoughts. And here’s where all this ties in with the Humanity Project’s mission. We are a nonprofit that helps kids to help kids, children teaching their peers through collaboration that strengthens feelings of self-value for everyone touched by our programs: the kids who create and teach the programs, the kids who learn the programs’ lessons. We firmly believe that the only way to live a truly fulfilling life is to focus our talents and experience on helping other people in meaningful ways. It’s not about self-obsession, it’s about rising above self. Our programs show young people how to lift themselves in the process of helping to lift others. And this requires teamwork. It requires “us,” not “me.”

So I offer this minor observation today about a new social trend in hopes of getting more of us to think. To think about the role of “me” in our own lives. And more importantly, to think as often as possible about “us.”

We Couldn’t Do It Without You!

Sometimes you have to take a few moments from a busy day to thank the people who matter to you. For no other reason than that – just because they are special in one way or another. They make your life better.

For the Humanity Project, those people include some wonderful folks from some wonderful organizations. Too many individuals to name them all … But we can thank them by thanking their organizations: Our great Humanity Project sponsors.

For starters, of course, there’s State Farm, a public-minded company that has been a major supporter of the Humanity Project since 2008. We can’t thank them enough for their vital funding and other assistance, which continues now in 2016.

Then there’s Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital and their parent, Memorial Healthcare System, which not only provide much-needed money but also many community resources to help us help kids. 

And our longtime friends at Children’s Services Council of Broward County, also loyal to the Humanity Project since 2008. And there’s Google. And Barry University and Monarch High School. Dr. David Sharaf and his Skin and Cancer Associates and the Center for Cosmetic Enhancement. And Blue Gallery and, recently, First Impression Printing.

We thank them all, most sincerely and most gratefully. Quite literally, they and the good people who work for them are the only reason we can give our programs to thousands of schoolkids each year. For free. These organizations make that possible for us. So on behalf of the Humanity Project, and on behalf of the kids we help … thank you once again to our sponsors! We hope you’ll reward their generous spirit by doing what you can to support them so they can continue to support our kids.

A Loyal Following

In our last post we talked about the many ways you can read about the Humanity Project’s work of “Helping kids to help kids!”™ This week let me follow up with a bit of news about our loyal group of social media fans – some figures that may encourage you to join them, perhaps, and also might interest our great sponsors and supporters. 

The Humanity Project now has eight social media pages, with the main links available through the icons on this home page. We’re proud that our organization actively used social media very early on, long before many large national and international nonprofits offered pages on sites such as Myspace and Facebook. We don’t post on Myspace anymore, of course, but our Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram pages have attracted thousands of folks who like to keep up with the latest Humanity Project efforts.

As of today, the Humanity Project has 7,496 followers on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram. And though these numbers may not be quite in the viral category yet, the online world now understands that sheer numbers alone don’t mean much. It’s not really how many followers that matters, it’s how many engaged followers. We believe those people who keep an eye on the Humanity Project’s social media actually care about what we do … and what we have to say about our supporters such as State Farm, Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital, Children’s Services Council of Broward County and all the others you’ll find listed on our “Sponsors” page. Please take a look at that list — these are the organizations that allow us to do our work and then give it away free to those who need it. So today, a big thank you to each of them. We hope you may want to become part of our team one way or another, as a sponsor or member or volunteer. Or an online follower. You’ll find that the Humanity Project can do more than helping kids to help kids. We also can help you to find more of the many hopeful, inspiring things all around us.

Join Our Online Family

Posted by: Bob Knotts

The Humanity Project wants you to join our work — or at least to keep up-to-date with our efforts of “helping kids to help kids.” Of course we’d love you to actually become a member, which gets you our cool t-shirt, member card and useful book about shared value, an empirical philosophy that explains how to live a fuller and healthier life through helping others. To send us your membership, just go to our “Join/Donate” page listed on the menu above.

But even if you don’t want to make that commitment yet, you can sign up for our free email newsletter. We ask only for your email address and we send out a single email newsletter monthly. No solicitations for money, no onslaught of emails. Look to the right-hand column on this home page under the video intro where it says, “Sign up for our Email Newsletter.”

Another way to keep up with the Humanity Project is through our social media. We have eight social media pages, with the main ones linked through the icons on our home page. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter, Instagram or Tumblr or YouTube. We think you’ll find this a fun way to get frequent doses of inspiration from the Humanity Project’s amazing kids, who work with us to help their peers prevent bullying and distracted driving and social isolation – always as part of improving their fellow students’ feelings of self-value. And please, explore this website as well as the I Care and thp4kids websites, which are linked here on our “Just4Kids” page.

The Humanity Project helps thousands of kids (and their parents) in South Florida and all around the United States. Our programs are free … and we believe you’ll find them uplifting and hopeful when you learn more about us. As you can tell by now, we’ve made that easy for you to do.

Take the Challenge

POSTED BY: BOB KNOTTS

The Humanity Project is always looking for fun, innovative ways to teach young people. We help kids to help kids — and we often find new methods to get across our lessons. Recently we created a simple game that we’re taking to community events as part of the Humanity Project table. And it’s a hit!

At last Sunday’s Tour de Broward for our great partners at Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital, we offered a fresh, clever challenge to make an important point: No one is good at multitasking! Meaning, distracted driving is never safe. We may think we’re great at texting or chatting or checking sports scores while behind the wheel. But chances are good the driver behind us wouldn’t agree. So along with our entertaining I Care event wheel, with information about distracted driving, the Humanity Project also has the I Care Tootsie Roll Challenge.

Taking the I Care Tootsie Roll Challenge!

Try it yourself, whether you’re young or old. It’s not easy!

As you see in the photo and especially the video at the link below, we asked young visitors to our table to toss a tennis ball in the air with one hand repeatedly while trying to unwrap a Tootsie Roll with the other hand. No fair using their teeth or bodies to help. It’s a small but telling demonstration that proves people are meant to do only one thing at a time. And everyone who tried it agreed with us. They got the message, along with some good laughs at themselves. I Care Tootsie Roll Challenge — watch the video! 

Our I Care teen driver safety program is sponsored by our loyal longtime friends at State Farm along with Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital and Children’s Services Council of Broward County. Now we have a new game that helps us reach more people in memorable style. Just one more engaging way the Humanity Project is trying to connect with kids, teaching young drivers and soon-to-be-drivers that texting and driving isn’t as easy as it looks.

Our Kids Tackle The Big Issue

Post by: Bob Knotts

In the previous post, we told you something about our Humanity Club. This time we want to let you know about one of the most exciting things about that new program, which is a live extension of our amazing www.thp4kids.com website – created by teens, for teens.

The Humanity Club, finishing their meeting with meditation

The Humanity Club, finishing their meeting with meditation

The website helps kids feel more connected to each other by teaching them about diversity, sharing and giving, kindness toward themselves and others, compassion.

We now have eight middle school students who have formed our first Humanity Club,  a team of leaders. With Humanity Project guidance, they’re finding innovative ways to take the thp4kids website’s ideas to their entire school, creating a climate of greater understanding and less bullying as a result. A remarkable thing, if you think about it. But here’s what I really wanted to point out to you today. These 6th and 7th grade students from Gulfstream Middle School in Hallandale Beach, Florida are directly tackling arguably the deepest, most meaningful issue in human life: How we see ourselves. Self-value. As Henry David Thoreau famously said, “What a man thinks of himself, that is what determines his fate.” Of course, Thoreau was writing in the 1800s when people used the term “man” to represent everyone. But his meaning is clear – and accurate. The quality of our lives flows from self-image. Our health, our work, our contributions to society, our relationships. Everything revolves around that core of our humanity.

We’re excited that our lessons on this profound topic already seem to be connecting with the Humanity Club members, lessons we’re teaching them through stories and videos and music and games and exercises of all kinds. If they can absorb the basic concept as expressed by Thoreau, we believe they also can discover methods for helping their peers to understand it. We’ll keep telling you how things are going as the club progresses. So far, we’re encouraged … and excited by these bright and engaged young minds. And we’re hopeful they can help us to help all the kids at Gulfstream Middle School to treat themselves and every other student there with greater respect. The Humanity Project, helping kids to help kids!™

“Humanity Club”

POSTED BY: BOB KNOTTS

We’re announcing something new today … the birth of our “Humanity Club” for kids. It’s a program that allows us to teach student leaders about ideas such as self-value, leadership, diversity and compassion. We work with the students to develop creative methods to carry those ideas to their fellow students, showing their peers why every kid at their school should feel like they belong. It’s another example of our Humanity Project slogan in action, “Helping kids to help kids.” It is the Humanity Project leading a small group of kids who will assist many of their fellow students in valuable ways.

First meeting of the new Humanity Club

We’ve already launched our very first Humanity Club, with a little help from our friends. Gulfstream Middle School is part of the nation’s sixth largest school district here in Broward County, Florida, where the Humanity Project is based. The good folks at Gulfstream are giving us the chance to develop this compassionate form of leadership in six of their student leaders — great kids … We are impressed so far with their intelligence and potential to make these ideas stick with their peers all around Gulfstream. In addition to Assistant Principal Christine Moss, we’re getting important help from Jamie Wood at Memorial Healthcare System. Memorial is the parent of Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital, a longtime Humanity Project sponsor and partner. Our thanks to Christine and Jamie, as well as other folks at Memorial Healthcare who helped us get going including Tim Curtin and Marilyn Camerota. And of course we appreciate the consistent support of Milin Espino and Jennifer Belyeu at Memorial as always.

We’ll be telling you more about our Humanity Club in the coming weeks. What we’re doing, how it’s going. But we can’t finish this blog without a big shoutout to another amazing Humanity Project sponsor and partner of long standing: State Farm. Our Humanity Club is a live version of our innovative www.thp4kids.com website, which was created by teens for their peers over a three-year period. This web project wouldn’t have had the same success without a major national grant from the State Farm Youth Advisory Board. We thank State Farm, their great YAB and our wonderful local State Farm partner, Jose Soto, for supporting our vision: Making a website that serves as an online friend for socially isolated teens, including many LGBT students. The Humanity Club will become an extension of the positive ideas on that site, a live format for connecting with every student about the importance of self-value.

Finally, a big thanks to two of the Humanity Project’s own Board of Directors members, Stephanie Wong who really created the Humanity Club, and Ferial Youakim, who’s contributing to our in-school sessions with the kids at Gulfstream. It is truly a team effort. We believe our Humanity Club can help us to help many kids at Gulfstream Middle School — and beyond. It is an opportunity to create an environment of cooperation among young students, to show them why every kid in their school deserves respect and appreciation.

Humanity’s Elevator

Humanity Project in Action

POSTED BY: BOB KNOTTS

Sometimes it’s hard to find exactly the right words. If someone asks you, “What’s the Humanity Project?” … how would you answer? Well, we have a suggestion today in this brief post.

They call it an “elevator speech.” It’s what folks who run a business create to tell others about their work quickly, something so brief they could say it in the time it takes to ride an elevator with someone. So here’s our suggestion for your Humanity Project elevator speech:

“The Humanity Project helps kids to help kids. They create programs working with talented teams of students, then take those programs to student leaders who teach them to their peers. In this way, they help prevent school bullying and distracted driving and they build feelings of self-worth in a broad range of students, including many LGBT teens.”

That pretty much sums it up – in the time it takes for an elevator ride. Please pass along those words to someone who could benefit from our free programs and materials. Tell them about the Humanity Project and send them the link to this website. You just might help them to, uh, elevate their life …

Welcoming Our New Board VP

POSTED BY: BOB KNOTTS 

Today we officially welcome Ferial Youakim to the Humanity Project. Our Board of Directors has elected her unanimously as a Board Vice President to join our work of helping kids to help kids. We feel lucky to have her as part of our growing organization — and honored.

Ferial Youakim

Ferial Youakim has founded nonprofit organizations and businesses from Australia to the Middle East to the United States. She created Mums on a Mission in Sydney, Australia, a nonprofit group that was honored with the National Health and Medical Research Council’s National Gold Volunteer Award for Australia. She has been a sought-after image consultant since 1986 on three continents, focusing her work on strengthening the self-value of clients around the U.S., Middle East and Australia. Ferial is the founder and director of ByFERIAL, an international image consulting firm, and an author and motivational speaker. She is the founding president of Image Impact International, past president of the Association of Image Consultants (Sydney and Florida chapters) and the Middle East Ambassador and Arabic Community Liaison for AICI. Ferial also was Goodwill Ambassador for the Touch Of Goodness Foundation and Second Runner Up for Mrs Australia International.

But there’s much more to her story, which is told in her new book, “You Are Beautiful: One Woman’s Journey.” The book isn’t out yet but we’ll let you know when it’s been published. For the moment it’s enough to understand that Ferial Youakim was born in a Lebanese refugee camp before moving to Australia in her youth. She now lives permanently in South Florida with her husband, Nabeel, a top Citrix executive. She endured many hardships as a child, sleeping two to a mattress in that difficult camp – and suffering through the murder of her father because he had helped a neighbor. All this is relevant because it has shaped Ferial, giving her a depth and insight that are rare. We know these and other great qualities will help Ferial to help our kids … who in turn will help other kids, their peers, to overcome bullying, prevent distracted driving and encourage feelings of self-value.

So again, Ferial, welcome to the Humanity Project! We are very glad you’re with us.

Kids Helping Kids

POSTED BY: BOB KNOTTS

You can see the Humanity Project’s trademarked slogan on our home page above: “Helping kids to help kids!” When you think of the Humanity Project, remember this phrase. That’s who we are. We help kids to help kids. So let me begin 2016 by explaining a bit more about why that’s true. Lots of other organizations do important work in the United States and around the world by helping kids. They feed hungry kids, they heal sick kids, they shelter homeless kids. They get kids off the streets or off drugs. All very valuable things, obviously.

But the Humanity Project takes a different approach that’s just as valuable: We work with kids to create programs for their peers. Then we take the programs to those peer groups … who in turn work as our teachers. They teach our programs to other kids. Okay, that may sound confusing. So let me put it in specific terms. If you visit our www.thp4kids.com website, you’ll see an example. We worked for three years with groups of magnet school and LGBT kids to create a website for socially isolated teens. Kids helping kids. (The website was made possible with a very generous grant from State Farm, by the way. It’s an unique and amazing resource for teens. Check it out.) Now we’re also taking the website and its important lessons about self-worth to a group of student leaders in school — and those student leaders will teach the thp4kids.com lessons to their school peers. Again, kids helping kids.

Or look at our acclaimed Anti-bullying Through The Arts program.

Our anti-bullying program at Welleby Elementary School: Jan. 11, 2016

This photo was taken during one of our presentations on Monday, January 11 … But our program doesn’t just involve adults telling kids to stop bullying. We teach kids how they can help other kids who are being bullied. We show young students why they should stop bullying and how to do it when they see someone being bullied. Kids helping kids.

Our I Care: Just Let Me Drive program uses the same model. We created the program by working with groups of bright, engaged teens. Now we take that I Care program to other teens who share it with their best friends, teaching their peers to avoid distracted driving. See what I mean? Kids helping kids.

Even the materials on this website are for older kids to share with their peers and with younger siblings too. (And of course our materials are also intended for educators and parents who can bring them to kids. Parents are very much part of the Humanity Project’s efforts of helping kids to help kids. Parents can use our videos and writings and quotes to offer guidance for their kids, who then can become role models for other kids. Parents are too important for us to ignore in our work.) But the main goal always remains the same. Helping kids to help kids! That’s what we do. That’s who we are. And we look forward to 2016 to do much much more of it for many many more kids of all ages.

Hope For 2016

POSTED BY: BOB KNOTTS

There is so much good reason for hope. There seems so much good reason for despair. As we prepare to begin 2016, I wanted to offer a few thoughts that some may find encouraging. I often feel the need to remind myself about all the uplifting things, the encouraging things … yes, the hopeful things happening around us every day. They can be easy to miss. 

We live in a time of frequent violence, of troubled race relations, of intolerance toward religions, of shallow opinions expressed with open hostility. And because we are fortunate enough to enjoy instant communication and wildly varied media sources, we must cope with the down side of that too: A continual bombardment of bad news and ignorant ideas. The world can appear bleak … if we let it.

But a deeper look at the reality shows us something different really is going on. Just this past October, for instance, the World Bank made a very important announcement — and it got little news or social media attention. The number of people living in extreme poverty is about to fall under 10 percent. For the first time. The organization reported that this is part of a quarter-century of sustained progress, offering a real chance to eliminate extreme poverty by 2030. Think about that. Now there’s a good reason for genuine hope.

Many other social markers also are wonderfully encouraging, things like the growing number of people with access to decent water. And nearly 200 nations recently signed a legally binding pact to improve our environment through limits on global warming. There is a long list of such positives if we look for them. In the United States, gay marriage is legal, bullying is recognized as a serious issue, more attention has been focused on the problem of distracted driving. Hope. All of these, good reasons for hope.

And in our own lives, we can find hope as well. I believe that learning to look past our immediate self-interest is one key to living a better life, in 2016 and beyond. If we find ways to share our talents and time and other blessings with people around us through efforts we care about, we can find meaning and purpose even during difficult periods. Helping others is the best way to help ourselves. That’s the lesson we try to teach our kids at the Humanity Project.

And so here at the Humanity Project, we welcome 2016. As we begin our 11th year as a nonprofit group, we are hopeful about our work of helping kids to help kids … and sometimes parents too. And we also are hopeful for a world that continues its slow, painful but real movement toward improved lives for all people.